Life With -- and Without -- Father

About the Author

Judging by the way they're often depicted in pop culture, the
answer would seem to be no. From the big screen to the small
screen, from books to advertisements, fathers are mostly bumblers,
abusers or dullards

When they're around at all, that is: Many a plot revolves
around
deadbeat dads who are simply gone, and no one seems the worst for
it. As a recent article in The Washington Post noted,
"There's an increasingly endangered species on modern television:
functional marrieds." The dysfunctional ones, by contrast,
are legion. The message is clear: If you don't have a father in
your life, don't sweat it. Heck, you're probably better off.

Well, with Father's Day just around the corner, it's time to
explode this so-called conventional wisdom for what it is: a
vicious lie. In fact, a wealth of social-science data, much of
which can be found on familyfacts.org, shows the
opposite to be true: Loving fathers bring a vital dose of love,
security and stability to their wives and children and they make a
very positive difference, indeed.

Here's one finding about fathers -- published in the journal
Child Development and compiled from samples of girls in the
United States and New Zealand, who were followed from age five to
approximately age 18 -- you can read in just two clicks from the familyfacts.org home
page:

Even when controlling for differences in family
background, father absence was associated with the likelihood that
adolescent girls will be sexually active and become pregnant as
teenagers. This association was strongest for daughters whose
fathers were absent when they were younger. Compared with the
pregnancy rates of girls whose fathers were present, rates of
teenage pregnancy were 7 to 8 times higher among girls whose
fathers were absent early in their childhoods and 2 to 3 times
higher among those who suffered father-absence later in their
childhood.

Another factor that positively affects the children in
a family is whether a father is religiously active. W. Bradford
Wilcox, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of
Virginia, conducted an extensive amount of research in this area
for his book "Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes
Fathers and Husbands." From it, the familyfacts.org site pulls
this eye-opening finding:

Frequency of church attendance is a stronger predictor of
paternal involvement in one-on-one activities with children than
employment and income, and its effect is comparable to that of
race, ethnicity, and education. Both active conservative and active
mainline Protestant fathers have significantly higher one-on-one
and youth involvement scores than their unaffiliated
counterparts.

Yet where are the fathers that we so
desperately need? Despite clear evidence of the positive difference
that they make, we've seen their numbers drop precipitously over
the last few decades. According to family expert Patrick
Fagan of The Heritage Foundation, in 1950, 12 out of every 100
children born entered a broken family -- four were born out of
wedlock and eight saw their parents divorce. Fast forward 50 years,
and the number quintuples: For every 100 born, 60 wind up in a
broken family -- 33 born out of wedlock and 27 see their parents
divorce.

As Fagan concludes, in the space of
one half century, America has transformed itself from being "a
culture of belonging" to being "a culture of rejection." And the
children caught in the middle pay the price. As Fagan writes:

How much of a difference do these absent fathers make? Plenty.
Survey data from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), for
example, show that teen-agers without a dad around are almost twice
as likely to be depressed as teen-agers from an intact married
family. They are more than four times as likely to be expelled from
school and three times as likely to repeat a grade. Drug and
alcohol abuse is much more common. On top of that, they are also
more likely to have sex before they are married-setting the stage
for yet another fatherless generation.

Life without a father also is a good way to miss out
on the American Dream. The poverty rate for all children in
married-couple families is roughly 7 percent, NIH data show. By
contrast, the poverty rate for all children in single-parent
families is 51 percent.

Maybe the folks in the make-believe world of television and the
movies can get by without "functional marrieds" and the dads who
make up one half of that vital equation. But for those of us in the
real world, fathers play an irreplaceable role. As I point out in
my book, Home Invasion,
they help us mothers raise the happy, healthy children who make a
thriving society possible.

So to all the fathers out there: Don't let the pop culture relegate
you to oblivion. We need your leadership and your love - we need
you. You are vital to your families, to our society and to
our nation's future. Please make every day a day of fathering.